


a sunny day in heaven

by metonymy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aging, Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 13:53:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1430899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/pseuds/metonymy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You always heard the stories about your mother's wartime adventures with Captain America, but that's not the same thing as finding him on your doorstep. A missing scene between The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a sunny day in heaven

It's a bright day. Sun shining through the windows, the house quiet and still like always now that even your youngest has graduated college. Mum is up and about today, settled in her favorite chair with the tablet you got her for Christmas. Easier to hold than the large-print books from the library, since she hates her glasses and keeps losing pairs on purpose. You're in the kitchen and about to sit down with a cup of coffee when the doorbell rings.

The absolute last thing you expect to see is a superhero standing on your front step. Everybody knows that face after the New York disaster, the profile from the old newsreels back on the cover of every paper and scrolling across the nightly news. And now it's standing in front of you on your stoop in the suburbs, a motorcycle parked neatly at the curb. No helmet, you think, knowing the very thought is patently absurd. How very irresponsible.

You swallow hard. "Can I help you?"

"Mrs...?" He looks down at you with an expression that's… it's nervous. That's unexpected. "I'm sorry, do I have the right house?"

"You're Captain America," you blurt out, and you wince at yourself. "Sorry. I - you're here to see Mum, aren't you?"

Because what other reason could Steve Rogers be standing on your doorstep at ten o'clock on a Tuesday for? And he's looking down at you like you're a bomb that's about to explode, and suddenly it all seems so absurd that you laugh. You scrub at your face and shake your head and offer a hand.

"Sorry. Hi. Yes, you're at the right house. Can we start over?"

He takes your hand in his, warm and strong and gentle, and shakes it twice. "Steve Rogers, ma'am. Pleased to meet you." 

You introduce yourself and take a breath, gathering courage. "Would you like to come in? I just made coffee."

And in five minutes Captain America is sitting at your kitchen table with a cup of black coffee and a slice of banana bread, his hands on the mug as you sit down. "How…" He stops, looking into the mug.

"She told us a little about you," you offer, looking at him as you sip from your own mug. Absently you wish there was some whiskey in it. Maybe after he goes. "We used to beg for her to tell us stories about the war, about her work. And - how could you not tell your kids the stories about Captain America?" You smile, and after a beat he smiles, but it looks awkward and wrong on his face. 

You wonder again just how far things went. She loved your father, you think, but she would get that faraway look in her eyes sometimes as she told her stories about the hero who did unthinkable feats and you'd wonder, even as a child. You would wonder if you would even have been born if he hadn't fallen into the ice, how different the world would have been if Captain America had fought to the end of the war. 

When you were older, you were rummaging through her closet for something - the jewelry she only brought out for special occasions, maybe, or the cigarettes she claimed to have quit but would sneak after really bad days. But the envelope you touched on the top shelf wasn't either of those. You couldn't resist pulling it down and opening it, sitting down on the closet floor and secretly thrilling with the transgression. The envelope smelled like powder, and dust, and a hint of the old perfume Mum never wore anymore. There were papers inside, heavily blacked out with bars of ink. A pamphlet on heavy stock, a program for a band you've never heard of at someplace called the Stork Club in New York. A raggedy flyer for a war bond tour, the cheap ink faded to to queasy shades from the original red-white-and-blue of Captain America's uniform. A pencil drawing on a torn notebook page of a monkey in the same uniform on a unicycle. And at the very bottom, a photograph of a short, skinny man squinting into the sunlight of a sepia-tinted afternoon. 

You didn't even realize your mother was there until she said your name, voice strangled in her throat and not angry like it should have been. And you looked up into the room where she stood at the doorway, her face twisted up for just a moment before it smoothed out into the calm mask of _what have you been doing, young lady, you're in big trouble._ Your mind raced, searching for some way to not make her mad, but all you could come up with was - 

"Did you love him?"

Mum's shoulders drooped and she looked suddenly… old. No, not old, tired and sad in a way you'd never seen before. Defeated, maybe. She crossed the room and sat down just outside the closet door, right on the floor, skirt rumpling terribly. 

"I did," she said, taking the last photograph from your hand and holding it. You could see it tremble in her fingers, the writing on the back blurred now. A name and a date and a place you'd never heard of, not until that day. "I loved him very much." And she'd told you his real name and a little bit more about him, about the boy from Brooklyn who respected her and treated her not like a princess but an equal, and she'd sworn you to never tell another soul. You never had.

And now you have him sitting here, looking too big for your ordinary kitchen chairs, and you have so many questions.

But that's not what he's here for. 

"Would you like to see her?" you ask, and his head snaps up and shoulders straighten. That is, after all, what he's here for. 

"Yes. If that's all right." 

You pause. "I… I should warn you, she's… well, she's old, now. She forgets things." A shadow passes over his face. "What day it is, what year it is. Sometimes she thinks Meg - my oldest is me." Did they have the word Alzheimer's in the forties? An errant thought, totally useless in the face of the emotion he's trying to hide. "But she's having a good day, today. And I think she would want to see you."

You remember the days after New York, when the heroes were everywhere, when the speculation was confirmed. You remember Mum watching the TV with tears spilling down her face in perfect silence. 

You never knew how to ask her what she was feeling. A ghost from her past, out of the ice and back in front of her. Her whole life lived thinking he was gone forever, mourned for and never forgotten. 

And now he's here, sitting in your kitchen, holding that mug so tightly you think it's about to break. "Do you still want to see her?"

He looks up at you and it's like he's not even seeing you for a moment. It's not that you resemble your mother so very much, you always took after Dad's side more. But you're a symbol of those seventy years he spent in the ice. Of everything he missed. And of the life she had that he never got. 

"I would like that," he says softly, sounding achingly young and unsure. Maybe that was what he sounded like in the days before he was the symbol, when he was small and weak and sickly, when your mother first met him. But you're not about to question this man, so you get up and lead the way to the sunny room at the back of the house. 

"Mum?" You step into the room, and she looks up from her book and smiles and you can see her old self shining through, her eyes bright as ever.

"Yes, darling?" 

"There's someone here to see you," you say, stepping aside as Steve Rogers walks into the room.

There's a gasp, and your mother's voice sobs out his name, and you see him kneel in front of her chair. She bends forward, those long curls hiding her face as she reaches for him. 

"Peggy," he says, and he lifts his hand to her face. You can hear your mother crying and laughing at the same time, a sound you've never really heard her make, and you turn away. 

"You promised me a dance," Steve says, and you close the door behind you.

**Author's Note:**

> Based mostly off that glimpse of the family photos next to Peggy's bedside, her interview playing at the Smithsonian, and Steve's face in that whole scene.


End file.
